


ايه اللي جابك و بتشكي لمين عذابك

by mahistrado



Category: SKAM (TV)
Genre: Character Study, Gen, Healing, whites are cancelled call back tomorrow, women of color will deliver this earth
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-15
Updated: 2017-05-15
Packaged: 2018-10-31 22:52:19
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,437
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10909107
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mahistrado/pseuds/mahistrado
Summary: sana goes home. [ post 4.05 ]





	ايه اللي جابك و بتشكي لمين عذابك

**Author's Note:**

> a bit of healing for my girl, post-imagine (we weren’t living in a racist, misogynist freak show). title from enta tani by haifa wehbe.

Sana stands outside, halfway down the steps to the river. Halfway means that people are less likely to stop and look at her for too long, and she stares intently at her phone, switching between the walking and bus tab where she’s mapping her path home. The walk from SYNG to her flat is 40 minutes. The bus is 24 minutes, and there’s two transfers. **  
**

She slides her eyes up to the sky, where the sun is hanging halfway to setting. On her left, someone passes by with white blonde hair and light skin and a biting laugh and she jumps, flinches so deep that the girl looks back over her shoulder at Sana, eyes lingering on her turban, the way the black of her eyeliner has smudged around her eyes. Sana bristles, narrows her eyes, squares her shoulders, remembers who she is. The girl turns around quickly, curling her fingers around white forearm of the man she’s with. Sana thinks that they could pass as siblings, same round blue eyes and light, light hair. She wonders, without heat, how people who get sunburnt after 5 minutes of exposure came to burn and pillage the whole world.

She watches them retreat, and the fall of her hair across her shoulders calls the image of Noora and Yousef back into her mind, sharp. She casts her gaze down, looks at the black of her fingernails framed by the brown of her flesh, pressed against the edges of her phone case, and wills the _angerhurtsadness_ to bubble down again, kettle simmering instead of boiling over.

She forgets how long the walk home is. When she unlocks her phone, the app has erased her query, and she types it in again. The walk from SYNG to her flat is 40 minutes. The bus is 24 minutes, and there’s two transfers. She stares at the screen, sees white blonde hair, blue eyes, light brown skin, the soft curl of black hair against bitten down fingernails, _blinks_ , sees the path to her flat outlined in blue dots, and she starts off in a direction, _away_.

*

It takes 50 minutes to get home, and two minutes struggling with her keys, and one minute outside with her back pressed up against the front door, chin tucked to chest. Sana opens the door and holds it as she slips off her shoes, closing it as quietly as she can behind her. The house is dark and quiet, and after a moment, she understands that she’s alone.

Sana retreats to her room without turning on any lights, closes the door behind herself with a soft click. She strips her blazer off onto the chair already covered in clothes, and her fingers come up to touch at the pins holding her scarf in place. Her eyes rest on her image in the mirror above the dresser. The dark of her room and the ugliness of the day paints her memories in broad discolored smudges, recalling where she stood pinning her scarf a few hours prior, anticipation curling low and warm in her stomach as she texted with Elias and the girls.

When she catches sight of her reflection, the feeling grabs her from the inside. It’s waving at someone you’ve met a few times and they don’t remember you, it’s your mouth not fitting around a word in the right way and your friends laughing good-naturedly and correcting you because you’ve only ever read it and your immigrant parents don’t know what it means, it’s the feeling when you’re on a bus in the city that you were born in and people stare at you and communicate mostly in aggressive hand gestures, like you can’t understand, like you’d never understand.

It’s your best friend, rolling her eyes at the call to prayer, and disrespecting your brother and religion and trust; it’s the way this brown skin threatens from the outside simply by nature of existing; it’s having the audacity to live life fully, sweetly, painfully, from all edges and curves, while muslim.

It’s humiliation, feverish and awful under her whole skin, and it’s a wretched sort of loneliness: the kind that isn’t based in a place or a situation or a people, but instead in a life, in splitting roots among two lands, in countries and families torn across borders and nationality. It bruises under her eyes and in the softness of her stomach, vulnerable, bare and trusting that her roots were finally taking this time.

She presses her fingers to the edge where her hair and hijab meet the curve of her ear, meets her own eyes in the mirror, tries to find the darkness there that everyone seems to be seeing. She looks the same as always, edges carved with powders and eyeliner, and the soft round of her face painted in a warm palette of browns.

Sana thinks that she is beautiful, sometimes more beautiful than her white friends. Today was one of those days. _Still one of those days_ , she corrects herself, gently thumbing away the blackness under her eyes where the liner has gone awry. She loves the fullness of her lips and the angles of her eyes, the way her dark lashes frame her eyes without mascara.

Sana blinks, watches the movement as long as she can before the world goes black and comes back again. Her room is a wash of blues led through the window as dusk sets in. She looks out the window, and presses the lock button on her phone to check the time but the screen stays black.

She glances up into the mirror again, sees her browns washed out with blues, remembers her face washed out in purples, hiding behind a bathroom door. Thinks _fuck that_ , and turns away – not from her reflection but from this light that is making her seem like so much less than she is.

She flicks on the light and goes to wash.

*

Sana removes her nail polish methodologically, the sharp astringent of the acetone cutting the sweet scent of the reed diffuser. She unpins her scarf and sets it aside, pushes her sleeves up past her elbows.

She folds her hands across her stomach and makes _niyaat_ , closing her eyes and nudging the rest of her thoughts gently aside. She washes her hands, her face, her arms. She focuses on the feeling of the water sliding down her skin, imagines the heaviness in her heart as passenger as she lets the water drip from her body to the basin. Imagines her mind full of light, _bismillah_.

She smoothes her hands over her hair from her hairline down, drags up behind her ears and gently along the inner edges.

_Ash‐hadu anlaa ilaaha illAllah, wa ash‐hadu anna Muhammadan rasululah._

The world goes very quiet as she reenters her room. She wraps her widest scarf around her head and over her shoulders and folds her sleeves back down. When she closes her eyes, she feels the hot burn of embarrassment and anger return as she turns inward, images of white faces turning towards her, talking about her behind hands, her own missteps over the last month all flash unbidden behind her eyelids, and she shakes her head, blinks her eyes open again.

Her own words return to her: _in spite of all the chaos_. She calls herself back, gently, lovingly. She holds herself around the middle, and rubs soothing circles with her thumbs into the soft fabric of her shirt. _Return to what really matters._

Here is the truth: she is angry because their pity is not welcome here. She _loves_ her edges, the parts of her that defend her right to live as full of a life as these boring white women, the parts of her that are stubborn and hard and paranoid, all the parts of her that bite back. She bites back for the next woman in a hijab on the bus, for her mamma, for the girls deciding whether or not to cover.

She loves herself, all of herself, is what they don’t understand. She loves her faith, and her grace, and the generosity of her spirit that allows her to stretch so far into both of her worlds, to try and make them work together; her resilience, patience, and her depthless capacity for love and loyalty, _mash’Allah_.

She straightens, empties the fire in her stomach onto the floor in a deep exhale, lets her inhale flood her heart with the love she has for herself, borne from the love her god has for her, bright and cleansing. 

She raises her hands and begins to pray.  

**Author's Note:**

> u are so beautiful and u deserve the world, yes u
> 
> rant with me on tumblr @ mahistrado xo


End file.
